ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly traces a particular history of sexuality and sport in North America and how the emergence of a nascent homosexual identity in the early twentieth century, up to the emergence of a gay and lesbian civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has both enabled and constrained certain normative kinds of white queer athletic subjectivities to become representable in the current moment. It focuses on queer sport scholarship, an analysis that understands sport as a cultural form that is forged through powerful discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and capital. The chapter illustrates how sport and sexuality have been deeply constitutive of one another as discursive formations through the demands of gender, race, and capital. It emphasizes that the earliest precursors of queer sporting identities were always already formed through systems of power, even as those realities have not necessarily been explicitly brought forward as constitutive for the field of sport and sexuality.
